repetita iuvant - at least, to myself!

Sorry for the Latin, that's only to introduce something that I've already posted somewhere else around...
(Post modified to add this translation: "repetita iuvant" means that there's a benefit from doing or saying something again)

**** My Personal gauge for tatting ****

Sometimes in a pattern a thread is recommended, different from what we have (and we have a lot! But not that! Urgh!). Instead, there's that very old ball, without a label, that seems likely to be perfect for the project... We'd be very happy to know the size of our thread. In these cases it's useful to have already prepared our "gauge for tatting "!

I tested my tatting to know how many ds there are in a chain that is 1 cm long. I repeated the process for each size of thread I had, and I obtained a table. That it is what I did:

I took a card and cut a rectangle of 10cm x 1cm. (I wrapped it with adhesive tape to reinforce it.) The size of 1 cm is my choice, but you can use 1 inch, or whatever it is your standard base to measure.
I tatted like for a normal ring, but before closing, I entered the card into the ring and tatted enough ds to reach the length of the gauge. Then I closed the half ring (the second half in the back had no ds).
I marked the thread number and how many ds in it.
Eventually I had my own table:

To double check (and because I use the table to design, too) with the help of a drawing tool, I’ve supposed that if 1cm has 7 ds, then 2cm should have had 14 ds. Tested it and discovered that’s not true with me, because I tend to be tighter as more as the length increase. But, in general my patterns hardly have long chains, more than 30 ds. So, the mathematical ratio works well for most of the time.

About rings, that's only a bit different, because I’m usually tighter. That means that the circumference of a ring made with 14 ds and thread n. 80, will be a little smaller than 1cm. I’ve obtained 0,90 cm (instead of 1cm).  But in order to design, and in order to have only an idea of the number of ds a pattern could require (it’s an empirical fact), I’ve always supposed the same size and ds numbers both for chains and rings. Anyway, designing is a matter of trials and errors!

Do you like a cupcake now? But you'd need a magnifier for this!

Ciao,
Ninetta